Biography

More about me…

I call myself and am called Morgan and am gradually reclaiming my birth surname of Fox. My very venerable mother of course calls me the name she gave me, Ann, and for official purposes I can still use my ‘legal’ name Ann Morgan, but please call me Morgan.

When I am asked to give myself a title on a form of some kind, I find myself at a bit of a loss. At my time of life Miss feels a bit daft, I’m no-one’s Mrs and Ms sounds horrible. The only prefix that seems to fit with my interdependent elder status is Mistress. Here is one of many examples of how a powerful word associated with women has been appropriated by patriarchal culture and devalued. To help me to be brave enough to start to reclaim this honourable female title, I am choosing to ignore the modern connotations of the word Mistress. If you insist on addressing me formally, what I answer to is Mistress Morgan. I think it sounds great and I am hoping to start a trend.

I have lived in or near Glastonbury since the late 1970s, coming to live here with a growing family because it felt like the best and maybe then the only place in England to have a real chance of being ourselves and being part of something more than conventional attitudes and material aspirations. I still feel that Glastonbury, or Avalonia as the town and its environs is sometimes called, is a treasure in the English social landscape.

It’s quietly cooking something, which is gradually revealing itself. Sometimes the longed for transformation into true community, abundance beyond consumerism and a radically liberated culture seems agonisingly slow. Being an Avalonian for over thirty years has taught me a lot including a bit more patience and I am reminded that the oak tree takes a long time to come into its full glory but when it does it shelters more wild-life than any other tree.

I was brought up in the period of post WW2 austerity, which has helped prepare me for today’s world. Until recently I did drive an old Rover that I inherited in immaculate condition from my uncle. With its wonderful Japanese engine it was the best car I ever had and I trusted my uncle would forgive me for using it as an all purpose pick-up in my work looking after my huge garden called Turners’ Field, where I lived from 1986 to 2003. I am presently trying a time without a car. I have a bus pass and thankfully TF is on a good bus route north into Street and Glastonbury and on to Bristol and down south as far as Yeovil. I borrow cars occasionally from friends, think more carefully about logistics and time management and save a lot of money to spend on other things.

My interests

I like to sit in circles of people in an experience of being fully present with ourselves and with each other. I am presently offering what I am calling ~ WE (Womens’ Experience) Days, which focus on empowered, assertive communication and life planning. I am personally convinced that creating gender balance everywhere in the world is the single most effective thing we can do to effect change everywhere and in everything.

I have a passion for sharing and facilitating the learning of personal empowerment and community building skills. In the old hierarchy we have inherited, I see an old unholy trinity of fear, blame and shame controlling our access to the power we need to take responsibility for our own lives, communities and our society. I try to live in every moment I can through a holistic trinity of honesty, love and freedom.

Over the 25 years of looking after Turners’ Field with others, with their help I have devised a structure, a model, a picture of what a holistic eco-communitarian life might look like. It is very different from the nuclear family, being a community of interdependent individuals and uses Celtic Round Table mythology and its six major characters as a template, hence calling it INTERCULTURE. I have worked out a neat acronym for it!

I am training to be a mediator, to do my bit to aid the creative management and resolution of conflict, bypass the need for legal action and facilitate people in devising strategies and solutions that protect relationships, projects and body and soul. Ultimately, learning and sharing the skills of mediation and creative conflict management is how we will bring about and sustain world armistice (see WAVE next update)

I have a daughter and a son, a granddaughter and a grandson. My relationship with them is very strong and loving and sometimes stressed by old patterns. I know that my dream of eco-communitarianism for individuals may not quite be theirs. I would like to help to leave them a legacy of real choice about how they want to live in relation to others. I just want to share my passion for painting a holistic picture for a way of life other than the Nuclear Family or solitary living. I think perhaps my enthusiasm comes over as pressure, to agree or to change.

I take a great interest in food. I am sure that the only way to approach the healing of our relationships with food, whether we are starving ourselves or overfeeding, is holistically. When our relationship with food and its purpose and role in sustaining us all and our world is whole, then we automatically love and respect food and the physical body that it nourishes. We can sustain a perfect body weight and nutritional health when we have a direct and sustained experience of the whole food cycle. Growing it, harvesting it, procuring what we don’t produce from as close to home as possible, preparing much of it to eat raw, cooking some with genius, preserving it, processing into beverages and luxury confectionary (eg jam and puddings) for special treats, effortlessly entertaining friends and neighbours and catering for special occasions and to feed participants at eco-events ~ all these activities can be inspirational and educational for everyone concerned.

My continuing passion for creating community is fed by my observations that right relationships with food, transport, travel, child raising, politics, economics, almost every aspect of life in fact, only really becomes possible in a communitarian context. I have seen children in communities eating the healthiest food with gusto, because it is altogether easier for people working together in a consciously ecological way to provide it for them as a normal everyday and joyful experience.

My vision

I have a dream of an eco-communitarian life that is designed and sustained using ecological principles to include and honour all our needs, material and non-material. My vision is distinctly different from the trend for eco-cohousing for nuclear families. I am only really interested in the development and implementation of a prototype of a co-operative, collaborative design for individuals that I am here calling INTERCULTURE. To this end, I am looking for collaboration in a project to run a series of design workshops on Turners’ Field .